Another case dropping off?

Posted Tue, June 4th, 2013 3:48 pm by Lyle Denniston

A test case on court review of the federal government’s broad plans for reducing the risks of forest fires in California mountains — a case due for review by the Supreme Court at its next Term — is likely to be taken off the Court’s list of granted cases. The Pacific Rivers Council, an environmental group that won the case in the Ninth Circuit Court, has urged the Court to wipe out that ruling and thus end the case: U.S. Forest Service v. Pacific Rivers Council(docket 12-625).

The group said that “it no longer wishes to litigate this case further,” after losing much of what it had won because of a later ruling by a U.S. District Court. Because the case was taken to the Supreme Court by the Forest Service, that federal agency might file a response to the group’s motion to vacate the Ninth Circuit Court, but it would not be likely to oppose that outcome.

If the case is dismissed as moot, it would be the second granted case to be removed from next Term’s docket. On Monday, the Court sent back to the Sixth Circuit Court for a new look a previously granted case on the legal rights of prison inmates challenging their convictions (Burnside v. Walter, 12-7892).

The Justices had agreed on March 18 to hear the Forest Service’s challenge to a Ninth Circuit ruling allowing the Pacific Rivers Council to challenge the environmental impact of a sweeping plan that the Forest Service had made in 2004 on reducing the wildfire risk in eleven national forests in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. That plan did not deal with site-specific projects, but with longer-term planning initiatives.

The Ninth Circuit, besides finding that the environmental group had “standing” to make that challenge, ruled that the Forest Service had to analyze the environmental impact of its broad programming document on species of fish. Such an impact had to be evaluated as soon as possible, the Circuit Court decided. The Forest Service challenged both the “standing” and merits parts of the Circuit Court ruling, and the Supreme Court accepted both for review.

In its motion to vacate, the Pacific Rivers Council noted that the Circuit Court had sent the case back to a district court, and that the district court had decided to go ahead without waiting for Supreme Court to rule on the Forest Service petition. Then, the motion said, the district court wiped out most of the remedy that the PRC had been seeking in the case.

Telling the Court it no longer wanted to pursue the case, the PRC said that it “would likely face the need for substantial costly and time-consuming additional litigation in order to achieve what it views as meaningful relief. PRC had therefore determined that it wishes to abandon its claims challenging [the Forest Service’s 2004 plan]. It no longer seeks to obtain the relief that it sought when it filed this case.”

Thus, it asked the Court to vacate the decision of the Circuit Court, and return the case to the district court with instructions to dismiss it as “moot” — that is, no longer a live controversy. The Court usually grants such requests.

Merits Case Pages and Archives

The court issued additional orders from the December 2 conference on Monday. The court did not grant any new cases or call for the views of the solicitor general in any cases. On Tuesday, the court released its opinions in three cases. The court also heard oral arguments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The calendar for the December sitting is available on the court's website. On Friday the justices met for their December 9 conference; Honeycutt v. United States.

Major Cases

Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.(1) Whether courts should extend deference to an unpublished agency letter that, among other things, does not carry the force of law and was adopted in the context of the very dispute in which deference is sought; and (2) whether, with or without deference to the agency, the Department of Education's specific interpretation of Title IX and 34 C.F.R. § 106.33, which provides that a funding recipient providing sex-separated facilities must “generally treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity,” should be given effect.

Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami(1) Whether, by limiting suit to “aggrieved person[s],” Congress required that a Fair Housing Act plaintiff plead more than just Article III injury-in-fact; and (2) whether proximate cause requires more than just the possibility that a defendant could have foreseen that the remote plaintiff might ultimately lose money through some theoretical chain of contingencies.

Moore v. Texas(1) Whether it violates the Eighth Amendment and this Court’s decisions in Hall v. Florida and Atkins v. Virginia to prohibit the use of current medical standards on intellectual disability, and require the use of outdated medical standards, in determining whether an individual may be executed.

Pena-Rodriguez v. ColoradoWhether a no-impeachment rule constitutionally may bar evidence of racial bias offered to prove a violation of the Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.

Conference of December 9, 2016

FTS USA, LLC v. Monroe (1) Whether the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Due Process Clause permit a collective action to be certified and tried to verdict based on testimony from a small subset of the putative plaintiffs, without either any statistical or other similarly reliable showing that the experiences of those who testified are typical and can reliably be extrapolated to the entire class, or a jury finding that the testifying witnesses are representative of the absent plaintiffs; and (2) whether the procedure for determining damages upheld by the Sixth Circuit, in which the district court unilaterally determined damages without any jury finding, violates the Seventh Amendment.

Overton v. United States Whether, consistent with this Court's Brady v. Maryland jurisprudence, a court may require a defendant to demonstrate that suppressed evidence “would have led the jury to doubt virtually everything” about the government's case in order to establish that the evidence is material.

Turner v. United States (1) Whether, under Brady v. Maryland, courts may consider information that arises after trial in determining the materiality of suppressed evidence; and (2) whether, in a case where no physical evidence inculpated petitioners, the prosecution's suppression of information that included the identification of a plausible alternative perpetrator violated petitioners' due process rights under Brady.